Archive for the ‘Technical’ Category

The latest iRacing build is arriving today, with the FW31 arriving a few hours following the build deployment itself. Following the footsteps of recent builds iRacing have kindly provided the release notes ahead of time.

Reading through the release notes provides a small preview of what we have instore for building FW31 setups :

- Introducing the 2009 AT&T Williams FW31.

- This is the first car for which we have written a setup guide, located within the Instruction area of the website.

A lot of the items are straightforward and have been used in other iRacing cars previously. There are a few setup parameters that are new to iRacing and are sure to cause some head scratching initially.

One of the parameters involves the inerter adjustment. The inerter first appeared in F1 in 2005 but it has taken a few years for their secrets to really become known (it seems until 2008 no reliable knowledge was in the public domain).

As we prepare to get truly confused with building FW31 setups here’s a useful guide to how inerters (originally called ‘j-dampers’ by McLaren) can be used in an F1 setup. If someone wants to really get into the task of building and tuning iRacing F1 setups, then they’ll need to have a solid understanding of how these work.

Last week iRacing held an open day at their office, inviting members the chance to see where the majority of iRacing staff work and a rare insight into how the service is managed. The lucky visitors were treated to a great tour of the office and had the opportunity to sit with key iRacing staff as they discussed future developments on the horizon.

A huge quantity of media (both video and still photos) came out in the days following the open day and here is a selection of some of the footage that made it out.

Dave Kaemmer explains the highly anticipated tyre model

Video footage of the forthcoming tyre model in action

A general overview of the day with key insights from Dave Kaemmer & Ian Berwick, previews of the new shadow rendering methods and Spa track progress!

Race footage from the forthcoming F1 and MX5 vehicles

More footage from the Williams F1

Finally, an official iRacing preview video of the MX5 cup and roadster vehicles, arriving in time for season 4 (just a few weeks away)

iRacing release their new build today (it’s out now) and one of the key talking points is the addition of a serious transmission model. No longer will we be able to slamshift into gears with perfect results!

I find that I can understand how things work much better when I can get a visual reference for what is going on. I only had a very rough idea for how a gearbox works so I spent the morning seeking some good visual representations for what goes on when you try and force a gear change in various gearboxes.

This link is the best one I’ve found so far – posting here as a permanent reminder for myself as I’ll definitely revisit it again and again!